Debriefing the Government Shutdown

Now that the government is back up and “running,” it’s time to debrief the government shutdown. An appropriate tool for this debrief is the method that emerged at the USAF Weapons School in the early 2000s: Debrief Focus Points (DFP). Let’s get to it!

The two DFPs are:

1. Families that lacked sufficient cash reserves suffered stress, incurred debt, and endured undue scarcity of food and other resources.
2. The Congress failed to do its job.

The contributing factors (CF) to each include:

1. DFP 1
   1. CF 1: Creating and maintaining an emergency fund isn’t fun or sexy. Dollars set aside for a problem that may never occur are dollars that can’t earn returns or create memories. We frequently rationalize that we’ll build an emergency fund after “X,” where X changes and seems to remain perpetually over the horizon.
   2. CF 2: We live in a society that idolizes consumption and immediate gratification while generally mocking frugality. The former consumes resources, and the latter preserves them.
   3. CF 2: Many families truly have no extra dollars each month after accounting for basic necessities. However, most of us evolve our luxuries into necessities over time. We also impose our own golden handcuffs when we take on unaffordable loans that are hard to exit.
2. DFP2
   1. CF 1: Americans continue to accept, support, and vote for politicians of poor character who optimize for attention-gathering over problem-solving.
   2. CF 2: Congress has become incentivized to curate culture war fear mongering rather than performing the difficult work of building bipartisan, durable, well-crafted policy. They would rather campaign on a problem than fix it, but we hired them to fix it. Put another way, when incentives reward noise over solutions, we shouldn’t be surprised when we get more noise.
   3. CF 3: Starting in the 1990s, modern politics tilted towards stoking division rather than continuing the hard work of convincing people that their policies actually make people’s lives better. This focus on division creates a fine outrage-industrial complex, but it does not improve the lives of the average American.

While it’s difficult to pin a single root cause (RC) for each of these, let’s focus on what we as individuals can influence.

For DFP 1, I’ll take the copout and say that CF 1 and CF 3 are both root causes. CF 1 affects families with higher incomes, and CF 3 generally hits families with lower incomes.  We can probably skip the psychoanalysis of why we have our money habits and scripts and just get to the instructional fixes.

There’s a saying that goes, “Show me your checkbook and calendar and I’ll tell you your priorities…” That is to say, we reveal our priorities and preferences with our actions more than our intentions and words. If we intend to build an emergency fund that outlasts government dysfunction, outsized PCS costs, and other income shocks, we need to change our actions, not just our intentions.

The best practices I see for building and maintaining emergency funds include:

1. Use a separate account, potentially at a separate bank/brokerage.
   1. Creating “physical separation” helps corral those dollars.
2. Name the account so you don’t use it for non-emergencies.
   1. It’s a mental trick, but it works by creating a promise we don’t want to break.
3. Automate transfers to the account each pay period.
   1. This is a great “Atomic Habit.” Make it easy.
4. If we skip IRA contributions for a year to goose the emergency fund, it hurts.
   1. We will protect that emergency fund because it was a gain born of pain.

For families that don’t currently have extra dollars to allocate, the road is harder. Dave Ramsey has the market cornered on the basics of good tactics here:

1. Jettison any fluff spending by developing, adapting, and executing a prioritized budget every month.
2. Break the debt cycle by snowballing out of current debts and forsaking non-primary mortgage debt for good.
3. Squeeze every spare dollar into an emergency fund and protect it like it were the last drop of water on the planet.

All of this is drastically easier said than done, but the only person who can alleviate the stress and suffering of the next government shutdown lives in the mirror.

For DFP 2, CF 1 is the root cause (RC). We make our choices when we cast votes, donate to candidates and causes, and, most of all in the modern era, when we give our attention to voices that amplify grievances rather than solutions. Yes, political parties stack the deck with gerrymandering, closed primaries, and support for extreme candidates. But this problem didn’t develop overnight, so it won’t be fixed that way either.

The list of Instructional Fixes (IF) for this root cause is almost endless. Still, we should rest assured that if we keep doing the same things, we’ll keep getting the same results: a Congress that fails to legislate and compromise to solve complex problems so that it can campaign, fundraise, and enrich members and donors while distracting Americans with culture war outrage.

Nonetheless, we can volunteer with political organizations, organize our own, be a squeaky wheel to our current representatives, and even run for office to change the tide.  We deserve better legislators in Congress, but we’re only going to get them if we support better ones and reject hyper-partisanship.

Finally, to try to convert the debrief process into internalized wisdom and improved future performance, we need our lessons learned (LL).

LL 1: Starting today, I will build next month’s budget based on my true priorities, and building an emergency fund will (temporarily) rank before costs that I begrudgingly admit are more luxury than necessity. I will open a separate account for my emergency fund.  I will automate a transfer to that emergency fund from every paycheck. If I encounter “found money” at the end of a pay period, I will transfer that to the emergency fund. When the emergency fund is large enough to weather any storms in my world, I will shift to rebuilding it as needed and periodically boosting it to keep up with inflation.

LL 2: Next time I will… support leaders who demonstrate competence and character, and avoid amplifying those who generate outrage rather than solutions. I will give my time, money, attention, and vote only to proven leaders with integrity and problem-solvers who focus on their core job: improving the lives of all Americans. Bonus if they focus on the Americans least able to improve their own lives…

Cleared to Rejoin

The 2025 Government Shutdown was one for the record books. Partisans will distract us with finger-pointing, but ultimately, we tolerate a dysfunctional Congress (whose incentives favor campaigning over governing). We can choose to stop doing so.

That fix will take time, but we can start fortifying and prioritizing an emergency fund today. Each family might debrief their emergency fund posture differently, and that’s fine, but realistically, we all need cash reserves to manage the unforeseen.  We must take our own agency to fix that, and we certainly shouldn’t wait for any help from Congress.

Fight’s On!

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